July 31, 2008 9:47 AM PDT
Nikon offers to beef up buffers for D3 users
(Credit: CNET)Nikon has issued a service note with some nice news for D3 owners: for $500 and a trip to the service center--for your camera, not you--the company will take your D3 and double its burst raw (as well as big JPEGs and TIFF) shooting buffer capacity. A handy-dandy chart in the notice indicates, for example, that the buffer for 14-bit uncompressed full-resolution raw files will jump from 16 to 36 frames.
Cynics might claim that Nikon's doing this to leapfrog the Canon EOS-1D's 20-frame buffer, but I don't think sports, catwalk or wildlife shooters are going to care about the why. And as far as we know, this is the first time a manufacturer has offered a physical upgrade for a camera that wasn't a fix.
Senior Editor Lori Grunin has been covering digital imaging for two decades, but her memory's kind of sketchy on the details. You can hear about it every week on Indecent Exposure, the podcast she co-hosts with Matt Fitzgerald. 
